Brooklyn Yard to Present Two Powerhouse Plays Out of Austin

New play incubator Brooklyn Yard returns with Austin Exchange featuring East Coast premieres of two fiercely funny two-woman plays by Hannah Kenah, Jenny Larson, and Diana Lynn Small.

In Larson and Kenah's Guest by Courtesy a pair of cousins wage their bizarre relationship over the course of a failing afternoon tea. Shuttling between high physicality and sheer vulgarity, the play plumbs the comedic depths of duration and desperation, with assistance from Jason Hays and live musical accompaniment by composer Graham Reynolds.

In Small's Mad & A Goat, a money-obsessed college graduate attempts to manage a Wyoming goat farm she inherits from her occult-leader birth parents. West Coast based actors Heather Johnson and Paige Tautz play the graduate and everyone she encounters with rapid-fire synchronicity.

Brooklyn Yard presents both plays in a single evening in a composer's living room and backyard garden in east Bed-Stuy.

Kenah (Stop Hitting Yourself, LCT3) and Larson (From the Pig Pile: The Requisite Gesture(s) of Narrow Approach, New Dramatists) have presented Guest by Courtesy at the Fusebox Festival, Austin and She Makes Theatre Festival in Bulgaria.

On bringing the show to Brooklyn Yard, Larson says, "The play takes place in the poor cousin- Jenny's- apartment, yet we've never had the piece in a traditional living room. We've been in a theatre, a masonic lodge, and a royal palace... an apartment in Bed-Stuy seemed like the perfect next step."

Diana Lynn Small premiered Mad & A Goat at the Cohen New Works Festival, Austin after development in Colorado. "Much of the play's theatrical conceit was stolen from [British theatre maker] Tim Crouch. And much of the play's story was stolen from my own insatiable love for money," Small says. "There is seduction. There is beer. There are biscuits. They're not afraid of proximity. There may or may not be real goats."

Austin Exchange runs at Brooklyn Yard from July 22-30, and features Guest by Courtesy and Mad & A Goat in a single evening of performance. Featuring Jason Hays, Heather Johnson, Hannah Kenah, Jenny Larson and Paige Tautz, with live musical accompaniment by composer Graham Reynolds (Richard Linklater's Bernie and A Scanner Darkly) on July 22 and 23, lighting design by Rachel Alulis, and additional production by Caitlin Wees.

Performance Schedule:

Fri July 22 at 7:30pm

Sat July 23 at 7:30pm

Sun July 24 at 7:30pm

Mon July 26 at 7:30pm

Wed July 27 at 7:30pm

Thurs July 28 at 7:30pm

Fri July 29 at 7:30pm

Sat July 30 at 7:30pm

Austin Exchange will be presented at a living room pop-up in east Bed-Stuy. Easy subway access via J train Chauncey; C train Rockaway Ave; L train Bushwick-Aberdeen. *Exact address will be provided after tickets are confirmed. **This is a living room and backyard venue with stairs; not easily wheelchair accessible. Tickets $18; visit brooklynyard.org for tickets and information.

Hannah Kenah is a writer and performer, and member of the Rude Mechs. Her work has been seen in Austin and NYC (Stop Hitting Yourself, LC3), at Yale Rep (Now Now Oh Now and Walker Arts Center, New York Live Arts, RADAR LA, and Z Space (The Method Gun). She trained with Dell'Arte and Dartmouth, and focuses on distilled, hyper-sharp worlds. Currently she is writing Field Guide for the Rude Mechs, under commission from Yale Rep, and will begin at the Michener Center for Writers in the fall of 2016.

Jenny Larson is the artistic director of Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin, where she curates, directs, and produces new American avant garde. In addition to her work with SVT, Jenny has collaborated with the Rude Mechs (I've Never Been So Happy, Center Theater Group and Arena Stage) Sibyl Kempson (From the Pig Pile: The Requisite Gesture(s) of Narrow Approach, SVT and New Dramatists), as well as Rubber Rep, Physical Plant and Trouble Puppet Theater, and playwrights Andrea Thome, Caridad Svich, Jason Grote, and Daniel Alexander Jones. Guest by Courtesy played at the Fusebox Festival and the SHE MAKES THEATER festival in Sofia Bulgaria. Her next projects include directing The Casta Project, with playwright Adrienne Dawes and visual artist Beth Consetta Rubel, and With Great Difficulty Alice Sits by Hannah Kenah.

Diana Lynn Small writes, acts, and directs for the stage. She's a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and has made new theatre with UT Austin (Good Day; Enter a Woman Pretty Enough; Mad & A Goat), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (We're Still Kids), Westmont College (Muéveme Muévete; Beauty Bomb, They Must Be Wings; Jupiter I Love You), and ZACH Theatre (Dream: A Midsummer Forrest Tour). Diana was an artist in residence at Tofte Lake Center. Her play Good Day was selected for the 2015 Great Plains Conference PlayLabs and Kitchen Dog Theatre's New Works Festival. Diana returns to stories about the American West, past and present. She grew up in Martinez, California three miles south of the Shell Oil Plant and three miles east of the John Muir Historic House.

Brooklyn Yard is both an arts incubator and a traveling pop-up venue, committed to staging simple, well-executed productions of new plays by emerging playwrights. Begun in 2015 with a workshop of Gabrielle Reisman's Storm, Still, Brooklyn Yard aims to get people out of the places we usually see theatre, and to launch the plays it develops on to a larger life in New York City and beyond.

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